Crossing of Reality and Fantasy - Zhang Yuan Fan’s Artworks

Kwang Soo Oh (Fine Art Critic, Chairman of Arts Council Korea)

Except for several naturalistic works, Zhang Yuan Fan's works tend to be filled with collage-based surface composition, hieroglyphics and planar compositions and, as extension of them, various magical shapes and symbols based on the planar compositions. Starting from pure nature, they are gradually inclined to evolve into a formative logic that takes place on the plane. As the concrete natural forms are erased, freedom of composition leads his works. Brilliant and transparent color sense and resilient surface division manifest that his interest is based on the nutrients of the diverse achievements of contemporary art. It is apparent that the compositional patterns accompanied by cheerful and deep resonance reflect his ever deepening compositional logics.

Zhang Yuan Fan's art career reveals somewhat surprising aspects. It is not unusual to find that some Chinese contemporary artists have exceptional career paths which are different from those of ordinary artists. One example is non-academic school of artists who became and work as artists without any background of academic art courses and the case of Zhang Yuan Fan is also exceptional in that he entered the path of art after working as a farmer and factory worker during his adolescence. This is probably because he spent his adolescence during the unfortunate period of Cultural Revolution. After finishing his art school, he went to Japan to study art as a scholarship student and returned to his homeland to work as a professor at his very alma mater. It is not difficult to guess that his career, ridden with perseverance and effort, is different from those of ordinary artists. Vigorous pursuits manifested in his formative works seem to be closely connected with such background of his.

It is not too much to say that his consciousness on the images reflects his mastery over wide and far formative logics. Out of inertial description of objects, carving formative language of his own on one order of image demonstrates that he has already established a solid status as a formative artist. The dimension of depth and width of the images through surface division, surface composition and collage is all-out reflection of his formative inside that is getting ever more mature. It is no exaggeration to say that his free composition of hieroglyphics and progression to allusive and extremely imaginative images reminiscent of the symbols and amulets of the primitive era tell us that his world is becoming more ripe than ever.

Numerous Chinese contemporary artists have been introduced to Koreans. Chinese pop art which appeared as a critical realism in the 1980s is widely known and traditional ink painting works have occasionally been exhibited as well. As Zhang Wen Fan demonstrates his own independent domain which belongs to no specific domain, it provides us with a feeling of seeing yet another cross-section of Chinese contemporary art. I have no doubt that his works, accompanied by his own awareness of long tradition and his own independent acceptance and interpretation of modern aesthetics, will exert not a little influence on the art of Korea, as a neighboring country (in similar situation).